Volume 637 Issue 8047, 23 January 2025

Researchers, governments and others can all play a part in ensuring climate policies remain in the interest of all.

Persistent exposure to heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and more will take a toll on people’s bodies. We must learn how this will manifest.

Vegetation clearing to extract nickel, which is used in renewable technologies, leads to greater carbon emissions than realized.

Blurry markings more than 1,000 years old become clear again thanks to scanning method.

Influenza viruses have not evolved resistance to suraxavir marboxil, which relieves cough, fever and other symptoms.

Model that predicts the spread of winning margins could be used to detect electoral interference.

The threshold has been exceeded for only one year so far, but humanity is nearing the end of what many thought was a ‘safe zone’ as climate change worsens.

Model microbes such as Escherichia coli hog scientists’ attention, leaving most known bacteria with few publications devoted to them.

Machine-learning system can process words spoken in 101 languages, spitting out voice-synthesized translations in 36 target languages.

A pair of spacecraft developed by private firms blast off on a single rocket on the risky voyage to the lunar surface.

Fresh approach to diagnosing the condition looks at how excess body fat affects the body.

Experimental model’s record-breaking performance on science and maths tests wows researchers.

Machine learning has supercharged the field of computational protein design.

Developers have tricks to stop artificial intelligence from making things up, but large language models are still struggling to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Researchers are exploring how to prolong ovarian life and revisiting hormone replacement therapy — a once routine treatment that has fallen out of favour.

A statistician offers a masterful guide to embracing the unknown.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

The Nobel prizewinner worked tirelessly with wife Rosalynn Carter to eradicate Guinea-worm disease.

Children and teenagers bring unique value to research as advisers and participants — raising ethical and practical issues about how best to compensate them.

The secure and ethical use of genetic testing can assist family reunifications in Ukraine and other settings for humanitarian disasters.

‘Lab vans’ and other facilities can bring researchers closer to what they study.

Sustainability and artificial intelligence dominate our seventh annual round-up of exciting innovations.

Oceanographer Andrea Kealoha studies how the devastating Lahaina wildfire of 2023 affected the coral systems of Maui.

Chemicals derived from neurotransmitter molecules in the brain can act as epigenetic marks on histone proteins to regulate gene expression. These marks control circadian clock genes and influence behaviour.

The enzyme nitrogenase ‘fixes’ nitrogen gas to form bioavailable ammonia, a vital process for life. Two studies solve a long-standing mystery: how a small protein saves nitrogenase from destruction by oxygen.

Bursts of electromagnetic radiation that share similarities with birdsong have long been observed close to Earth. A detection farther out in space confirms a key part of the theory of their origin, but also poses questions.

An artificial-intelligence model trained on data about where DNA is tightly packaged and where it is open to regulators can predict gene expression and interactions between transcription factors that regulate key genes.

Approaches for the development of future at-scale neuromorphic systems based on principles of biointelligence are described, along with potential applications of scalable neuromorphic architectures and the challenges that need to be overcome.

A study aimed at revealing the role of small-scale fisheries in sustainable development shows they provide at least 40% of the global fishing catch and affect the livelihoods of 1 in 12 people in the world, among other important contributions.

Whistler-mode chorus waves have been observed in the tail region of the terrestrial magnetosphere, where the magnetic field is not dipolar so that chorus waves were not expected, and their generation mechanisms have been tested with state-of-the-art observations.

Intrinsic molecular resources are used to implement a two-qubit iSWAP gate using individually trapped X¹Σ⁺ NaCs molecules.

By engineering an exceptionally controlled environment using rotationally magic optical tweezers, long-lived entanglement between pairs of molecules using detectable hertz-scale interactions can be achieved.

Robust superconductivity is observed in twisted bilayer tungsten diselenide (WSe₂) on the verge of Coulomb-induced charge localization around half-band filling and zero external displacement fields.

We report superconductivity, in a limited region of displacement field and density, in 5.0° twisted bilayer WSe₂ with a maximum critical temperature of 426 mK, establishing that moiré flat-band superconductivity extends beyond graphene structures.

By using lithium thioborophosphate iodide glass-phase solid electrolytes in all-solid-state lithium–sulfur batteries, fast solid–solid sulfur redox reaction is demonstrated, leading to cells with ultrafast charging capability, superior cycling stability and high capacity.

Halide permeation through a single benzene-sized defect in a molecular nanographene shows the permeability of fluoride, chloride and bromide, whereas iodide is impermeable.

A photochemical method alters thiazole and isothiazole structures predictably that enables selective rearrangements and expanding accessible derivatives, thereby advancing drug and agrochemical discoveries under mild conditions.

Results derived from an optimal spectral fingerprinting method applied to reanalysis and satellite datasets show that low cloud cover in warming climates caused a reduction in downwelling longwave radiation over land, which is not site specific.

Large-scale experimental analysis of Human Domainome 1, a library containing more than 500,000 missense mutation variants across more than 500 human protein domains, reveals that 60% of pathogenic missense variants reduce stability of protein domains.

Multi-modal transcriptomic analyses of the sympathetic nervous system reveal organ-specific neural innervation and modular regulation of visceral functions.

Infection studies on highly pathogenic avian influenza virus clade 2.3.4.4b H5N1 on calves and lactating cows indicate that transmission occurs primarily via milk and milking procedures rather than respiratory routes.

A study describes the experimental infection of cattle with a highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b genotype B3.13 strain using an aerosol respiratory route for heifers and an intramammary route for lactating cows.

A deep mutational scanning approach identifies mutations that allow subvariants of the prevalent JN.1 SARS-CoV-2 strain to evade Omicron-induced neutralizing antibodies, indicating a need for careful monitoring of this lineage in vaccine development.

Resting and activated T cell states are established by context-specific regulators and dynamic gene circuits.

We evaluate the effects in humans of interleukin-15 co-expression on glypican-3 (GPC3) chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells and demonstrate that IL-15 increases the expansion, intratumoural survival and antitumour activity of GPC3 (expressed in a group of solid cancers) CAR T cells.

Colorectal cancer metastasis involves dramatic plasticity and loss of PROX1-mediated repression of non-intestinal lineages.

Large extrachromosomal DNAs are engineered using a CRISPR- and Cre–loxP-based approach and shown to drive cancer in mouse models, with potential applications in determining the role of oncogene amplifications in human cancers.

A foundation model learns transcriptional regulatory syntax from chromatin accessibility and sequence data across a range of cell types to predict gene expression and transcription factor interactions, with generalizability to unseen cell types.

TG2 functions as an eraser and exchanger of H3 monoaminylations, including histaminylation of Gln5 of histone H3.

TRiC functions at near full occupancy to fold newly synthesized proteins inside cells.

Cryo-electron microscopy of Azotobacter vinelandii FeSII–nitrogenase reveals a core complex of molybdenum–iron proteins (MoFePs), iron proteins (FePs) and FeSII, in which FeSII mediates interactions with MoFeP and FeP to position their FeS clusters in catalytically inactive but O₂-protected states.

A small ferredoxin (Shethna protein II) of Azotobacter vinelandii can provide protection from O₂ stress that may be crucial for the maintenance of recombinant nitrogenase in food crops.